Design of a low voltage charge pump circuit for RFID tag

Charge pump circuit is widely used in many systems due to its low power consumption, high performance, small area and low current drivability. This paper presents a low-voltage, high performance charge pump circuit suitable for low-voltage applications such as EEPROM of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tag. Designed in 0.18-μm CMOS process, the proposed charge pump circuit is able to pump an input voltage of 1.8V to a measured output of 5.95V through 20MHz clock signal with each pumping capacitor of 0.1pF and smoothing capacitor of 0.1pF at the output. Simulation result shows that the proposed charged pump circuit offers higher pumping gain compared with the existing charge pump circuit. Besides the RFID tag, the charge pump circuit can also be used in other memory circuits.